Silence

"Were men to learn the message
Silence always brings,
They'd learn to span Earth's bridges
To touch immortal things."

-- Sr. Elizabeth Loretto Triail, C.S.J.

By Father J. Guy Winfrey

Last week, I ended by pointing out that we need to develop silence so that we might begin reflecting. Silence is critically important for our spiritual lives. It is not as simple as turning off our televisions, radios, iPods, and the internet. Those little actions are only the first requisite step.

Once we have a lack of noise, what then? It is here that there may be some confusion, for a prayerful silence, a silence in which a Christian may enter is not simply a void or vacuum into which he moves or opens his heart.

Though it seems to have been lost on our generation, we need to understand that there is no such thing as a spiritual vacuum. There is always a presence. This is one of the great distinctions between Christian mysticism and far Eastern mysticism, most notably Buddhism. Christians believe in a personal God, or actually tri-personal. We strive to enter into communion with the Holy Trinity and not the great cosmic void. Silence, for the Christian, is therefore not simply an absence but a rushing into the community and presence of God. This is a critical point that will make all the difference in our continuing journey towards the great Feast of feasts: Pascha, or Easter.

When we move only into what we think is a void, we can easily be surprised by a presence. If we are fortunate, the presence is God himself. But there are also spirits who wish to remove us from the Holy Trinity and they offer great enticements and allurements, most notably blessing all that we do, asking us to amplify our current way of life, and requiring no change or struggle in our lives. It is not popular to speak of the angels of darkness these days, to remind us that we are in a spiritual war “against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places,” (Eph. 6:12) but we ignore them at our own peril.

I have met many people whom I fear have been led astray in their misguided prayer life (perhaps misguided is too strong, perhaps it has only been un-guided). Some begin to call evil good and good evil. There are many, many different Christian groups who now proclaim a new morality which the Church has condemned consistently for 2,000 years. Abortion is thought to be sometimes necessary—or even an active good. Homosexual activity is seen as a misunderstood lifestyle that is an expression of one’s unique being. The historic understanding of Christian marriage as being a fecund and fruitful community for the blessing of children, and the nurturing of a Christian family, and the sanctification of the members of the family has been almost entirely lost. Marriage is now simply for the pleasure of two persons; this is not marriage at all, but rather socially acceptable sex. This has produced catastrophic numbers of divorces, broken families and a dulling of our recognition of the tragedy.

Those who would say these are good changes have often claimed that it agrees with their prayer. But when it runs counter to the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel throughout her entire life, then one must ask about the validity of the person’s prayer. It is here that we come to realize that silence will always present to us a presence of either darkness disguised as light, or Light itself.

A Christian’s silence must be understood to be a thunderous silence in the presence of God. It is a silence in the heart where we sit in his presence and look upon his face. Icons are incredibly helpful in this. We may look into the eyes of Christ before us and move our hearts to him. Icons help us avoid distractions, or gods of our own imagination, or worse still, imitation gods with real personalities. You see once we have turned off the external distractions, the more difficult distractions to combat are those that are inside us. This is why we are so often distracted when we try to pray, or during church services, or sermons and the like.

Icons help us develop an interior silence without distraction. They direct us correctly because the image of the icon is that which is blessed by the Church as being authentic, so that we are not lead astray. They also help us to recover our sense of God’s presence when we become aware of our wandering thoughts.

This silence of palpable presence is the sort which is necessary for reflection and thought too, for our minds and intellects are not perfect. They too have participated in the Fall and they do not work correctly by themselves. It is only when we restore our minds and hearts in the presence of Christ that they can work properly as God designed them to do.

It is a difficult struggle to develop a sense of Christian silence. Try to do it in little steps at first, beginning with five minutes each morning for a month, then maybe seven minutes, and then ten. Say your morning prayers first before you enter into this silence. If it is helpful, follow your morning prayers with the lectio divina to launch you into the silence of God’s presence. I have suggested this to many of my spiritual children and they have all told me how it has changed their lives. If one persists in this over a period of years, it will be seen that one can remain in silence even when in the midst of a clamorous and cacophonous world.

Silence may be called “golden”, but when done correctly, it is the gold of the unending day of the Kingdom of God that we find and enter. May you find it so in your life, even today.

V. Rev. Fr. J. Guy Winfrey is an Archpriest in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and the pastor of St George Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

 

The Necessity of Reflection

By Father J. Guy Winfrey

Father Winfrey

As a culture, we have become a people who values instinctive responses. We seem no longer to value reflection and this is a tragic loss. This is true on every aspect of our lives these days and it is especially true when it comes to our faith.

I remember a conversation with one of my employers while I was in college. He knew that I was devout and that I was an active member of my parish, so he brought up the subject of religion. (In Texas, this is not a strange topic for conversation.) He was a Baptist, and the son of a Baptist minister. I remember trying to explain some point—I can’t recall what the actual topic was—and he was struck dumb. Finally he said to me, “I think you think too much about these things. We should have faith, and all of this analysis stops it.” It was my turn to be gob-stopped. I have not forgotten this exchange and it is emblematic of a certain sort of religious fervor that eschews the reasoning faculty of the human being.

Of course, religiously, this comes from the spirit of the camp fire revivals in the Great Awakening from which the sort of Baptists in the South generally come. It was a movement that emphasized the emotion and called that religious fervor. My formation made me very suspicious of feelings and emotions because they are so fickle and are terribly subject to manipulation. I visited a “mega-church” one time to tour the facilities and was shown a video control room they had set up for the services. It looked as complex and modern as the Monday Night Football truck. Then I was told that they had everything—the lighting, the sound, the backgrounds on the stage, etc.—programmed and calculated to evoke in the congregants particular emotions. Hmm… a scientifically designed program to effect a chosen religious spirit. It seems quite a dark thing to me: the emotion is the religion.

But this is also a symptom of a larger problem culturally. I have an intuition (something that is quite distinct from instinct) that modern reality programs, which are filled with drama and emotive dysfunction, are little more than the secularization of the remnants of the Great Awakening. They are the deliberate stirring up of emotions, but in the secular age there is no teleological purpose, no end in sight, so they stir up only to evoke the emotion itself. The emotions are the subject. One could say that reality programs are the product of secular Protestantism.

In our age, we do not take time to reflect, and because we don’t we sometimes try to force decisions and actions that are not fully formed. A lack of thought and reflection (for my English friends, reflexion) has been a typical charge directed toward Americans, but this was an exaggeration… perhaps until now.

The word itself is now thought of in mechanical, geometric or mathematic contexts usually. Reflection, coming from the Latin to bend back (reflexio), is a withholding from action. It is a pause in which one looks at things in the broadest possible manner and considers well. For centuries this has been one of the most salient characteristics of Western Christianity, especially from the scholastic period forward (not to say that the earlier Fathers of the Church were not reflective). It was not essentially instinctive, but meditative.

The one time bastion of thought, the university, has become little different than a middle-class secular tent revival. Students are natural protesters because of their immaturity and naïveté, but this has been distorted by many in academia to become the raison d’être of a university education. One wonders if they have ever read Newman’s, The Idea of a University? I doubt it. More’s the pity.

I am reminded of Newman’s period of reflection as he was leaving Anglicanism. He was one of the principle leaders of the Oxford Movement at the time, but he seemed to be drawn elsewhere because of many years of study and deep thought. He didn’t become a Roman Catholic quickly; rather, it was a process that extended over many years. For any who would like to peek into his process, they may read his Apologia pro Vita Sua.

Reflection must be recovered by us all—regardless of our religion. It must be recovered in politics, the university, our faith and our personal lives. To think and reflect is part of what distinguishes us from the animals; and this to me is one of the greatest damnations of purely instinctive processing.

Intincts are not at infallible. All animals have them and we know from Pavlav that they can be conditioned. A large part of military training is pointed directly at developing a specific set of desired intincts in the warrior. This is necessary for his survival and success as a combatant. But instinct is surely a baser aspect of humanity. Even military commanders don’t rely upon it for making tactical decisions.

There are certain Christian instincts that must be trained in the neophyte, like the natural repugnance to immorality, but reflection must be tutored and developed. It is an imperative. This is done through reading thoughtful and intelligent writers (especially the Fathers of the Church), and especially through meditating on these writings prayerfully.

If there is to be any hope for our civilization—religiously, politically, or intellectually, then we must restore the importance of reflection in our lives. We must not allow ourselves to be bullied into quick responses when these things require sober meditation and thought. Sometimes we cannot give an answer when one desires it. Sometimes the time required for reflection and thought may take quite a while—as I have already said, it took Newman several years before he could make a decision.

The last word on this is simply to point out the foundational necessity of silence for reflection. Before one can truly meditate, think, contemplate, and reflect, one must carve out a space of quiet. We must learn how to turn off our televisions, radios, and iPods. We must learn to enter into silence once more if we would be wise. How counter-cultural!


V. Rev. Fr. J. Guy Winfrey is an Archpriest in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and the pastor of St George Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.